Westchester and New York Indian restaurant reviews

Thursday, July 23, 2015

When I first saw Lily Aunty, she had
just arrived from Yugoslavia and was sitting in the bare professor’s
flat assigned to her in Pune, eating fried chicken and smelling of stale
smoke and perfume like European women did in
those days. There was a book of matches on her makeshift dining table,
which looked unusual to me, since I was used to matches that came out of
a regular little box. The chicken--just legs heaped on a
plate--fascinated me. I wondered how one could have cooked
up such exotic looking stuff with ingredients we had access to as well
and why there wasn't any rice or curry to go along with it. I was maybe
10 years of age and my mother and I had come to say hello to this new
neighbour of ours, who was going to spend a
year as a visiting scholar at my father’s institute.

Lily Aunty took to India very well and
soon became a close family friend. She went native, she wore a sari at
times, she called my mother Didi and on occasion unwittingly came to our
rescue. When my mother and I tried to get
into the Film Institute of India campus to meet some Assamese students,
we were halted at the gate by the sentry. As we argued, Lily auntie
whizzed by on the pillion of a friend’s scooter, her blond hair blown by
the wind. She waved to us. The sentry, impressed
by the fact that we knew a white woman, conferred immediate legitimacy
upon us and let us go. One must remember that these were the late
1960s, less than 25 years after independence.

Lily Auntie talked to us a lot about
her life. Told us about her father, who had been a partisan, fighting
the Germans in the second world war. He had been shot to death in a
concentration camp and the only memento that she
had of him were his blood soaked socks that were left over after they
killed him.

She was young, in her late twenties or
early thirties, and soon fell in love with a young Indian man with a
slim figure and a nice moustache. He was a reasonable guy who hung
around with Lily Aunty. We did not come to know
him too well and my mother, who had become like an older sister to her,
viewed him with suspicion. After a year, Lily Auntie’s term was up and
the couple wished to get married and return to Yugoslavia. This posed a
problem. These were still the hey-days
of the communist era and marriage to a foreigner required the
Yugoslavian government’s permission, which Lily auntie was denied.
Heartbroken, she returned to Belgrade alone. I was a kid then—I did
not appreciate the pain that such separation can cause. About
a year or so after that my mother met Anil, the young boyfriend, in a
public bus. He had married someone else by then.

Over forty years went by and I was now
settled in New York. Lily Auntie had been the first European lady that I
had come to know well, she loved me like a nephew, and I had never
forgotten her. One day, after an afternoon’s
conversation where I brought up her story, a good friend from her part
of the world dug up Lily Auntie’s phone number in Belgrade from the
internet. I called her up after that. It was an emotional
conversation. She reminded me of the clay necklace that I
had made for her over 40 years back and which she still had in her
possession. She had married a Sikh, had a family, and was settled. She
enquired about my parents. Her historical research specialized in India
and she was active in all things Indian in Belgrade.
She was a mother, a wife, a family lady, a professor.

Then, towards the end of our
conversation, when conclusionary statements begin making appearances in
the dialogue, she segued suddenly—and-- with hope and anticipation in
her voice asked whether I had any news of Anil. Her disappointment
at my answer was obvious in the ensuing pause. “He was my first love”,
she explained. “And I have always wondered what happened to him”. Even
though decades had passed and she was now the mother of adult children, I
did not have the heart to tell her about
my mother’s 1970 meeting with Anil in the public bus.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Decades ago, a hastily written American paperback memoir provided
good company on a train from Kokrajhar in Assam to Howrah. I had picked it up
in a dusty bookshop near the train station and the author was a mid-tier
Providence hoodlum by the name of Vincent Teresa.In my “Life in the Mafia”, Vinnie espoused the theory
that—in a case of life imitating art—all the wiseguys in the mob began speaking
like Brando did in his role as Don Corleone, after seeing the movie The
Godfather.Decades later one can
make a similar argument about Indian marriages.They have changed in style, across the country, to conform
to their representation in Bollywood movies.At some point, as the evening wears on, these ceremonies end
up with groups of men and women dancing indiscriminately to non-descript Hindi
film music wearing the sort of uni-culturally Indian formal clothing that takes
its gaudy colors straight from celluloid.Yet, striking differences
remain in the philosophy with which different cultures approach a marriage, and
I saw no better example of this than in a recent marriage between a Bengali and
a Punjabi family that I attended.

In the early evening of the reception, hosted by the
Bengalis, the entire Bengali contingent waited (I being part of it) in the
portico of a stately hotel for the Punjabi groom’s party to arrive.It was a handsome Federal style
building that looked onto a circular brick driveway with manicured grounds
beyond. And arrive they did. A large BMW swooshed by.Two large buses drew up.A horse materialized in the distance.Guests poured out of the buses and the
groom alighted and mounted the waiting horse.Under skies that had darkened to a thunderous gray, the
empty courtyard now filled with men in ceremonial turbans, women in bedecked
splendour, and a groom who stood ready for action poised upon a horse.As the party began its fifty-meter walk
to the hotel, on cue, the air cracked with the rhythm of a Punjabi beat belted
out by a tall drummer in a virile lungi. A troupe of Americans in headdress struck
up baraat music with their wind instruments.A couple of young dancing women in green led the convoy like
whirling dervishes and the men and women followed, shoulders snapping to the
rhythm, a bubbly, joyous, precious stone laden mass ebbing and flowing like a
viscous melt as they made their progress to the lobby. Photographers swarmed
and in a sign of the times a drone took to the air angling for camera position.In the meantime, the gathered Bengalis--themselves
representative of a culture whose celebration of even the most joyful of events
will strike melancholia into the heart of any normal human being--waited by the
entrance, three deep in rows, largely silent, taking in the ebullience of the
Punjabis with wide-eyed bewilderment.And what instruments of sadness they offer for such a celebration!Slow, delicate, lilting songs that will
have you close your eyes in concentration, the heart wrenching note of the
conch, the eyes of a bride who you know will cry as she leaves the house. All this for a marriage.Imagine their activities during a
funeral. And so as the joyous, swaying Punjabi morass met the gathered
Bengalis, the two fronts of these poles-apart cultures merged at the seam between
the portico and the brick driveway like two muddy rivers, each carrying the fine
sand of their differently colored lands. They had two things in common today—no
shortage of jewelry and no shortage of warmth.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Around 5 am I wake up at a hotel in the Aerocity region near the Delhi
International Airport. I am back in this city after exactly a month.
Outside, the dust and fog creates a dim early morning haze and the road
leading into the hotels complex, with its obstacle course barriers laid
out to deter would-be saboteurs, lies empty. There are a few cars in the
main thoroughfare beyond and the lights of Radisson Plaza
glimmer in the distance.

I am headed
out for a quick one night trip to Guwahati. As I get ready to get to
the airport, the Super Bowl has begun in the US. I cannot find it shown
live on TV here, but I track its progress on the web. By the time I
have washed up and am having my morning coffee, the Patriots are up 7-0.
Around 6 a.m. I check out of the Holiday Inn and take the short ride
to Domestic Terminal 1. I am rooting for the Seahawks and against the
Patriots, if only because the Seahawks are coached by Pete Carroll who
had brought USC back to its glory days in College Football in his
previous job. I had attended USC.

Delhi domestic terminal 1 is a
mess on Monday mornings, as business travelers get busy after the
weekend. When the traffic is sparse, Delhi airport with its megaplex
underpinnings, is a paragon of sleek efficiency. When the passenger
count approaches a critical number, like it did this Monday morning, the
place takes a different face and appears to be on the brink of
collapse. I try to check in at the crowded automated kiosk machines,
but I am flagged as being under a “watch list” because I had used a
credit card. So I have to then go to the line for people who are checked
in but need to do a baggage drop, and they fix it up for me quickly
there. Nobody tells me this: I have to ask around, and things do get
sorted out in the end. But this type of setup, where in the midst of an
apparently smooth and efficient process, an additional and unnecessary
twist ends up threatening your stumps is fairly common. The night
before, I had disembarked from the United non-stop from Newark, and the
staff did not have the customary immigration cards to give out to
passengers, because the government did not get it to them on time and
would not allow United to print them out either. So while the
immigration lines were moving briskly once you were able to join the
line, there was a helter-skelter mess prior to it as people ran around
looking for forms that were in short supply.

With my luggage
checked in and boarding card in hand, I check the web and the Seahawks
are now tied at 17-17. While America watches the Super Bowl, I stand in
a long, serpentine security line that folds back and forth about seven
times, with the sinking feeling that I will miss my flight. I monitor
the time on an overhead screen. It is 6:42 am and my flight is at 7:45
am. It takes me about 8 minutes to cover one fold of the serpentine
line. I am worried. But things pick up shortly and the line speeds up.
Moreover there is an accelerated bypass mechanism. When a flight’
sdeparture time is perilously close, a young representative in a smart
thigh length jacket comes by in a loud voice: “Hyderabad Indigo xxx”.
People way back in the line who are headed to Hyderabad raise their
hands and press forward. They are allowed to go through.

I go
through security by 7:10 a.m. and check the scores. Pete Carroll and
the Seahawks are beating the Patriots 24-14. There is an undercurrent
to this game. Carroll was coach of the Patriots at one time. But he
was booted out after a miserable win record that was attributed in part
to his persona being too “bubbly”. He then brought over his effusive
nature to the college game as USC’s coach and—over the course of the
next several seasons—turned USC’s, and his fortunes around, ending up as
one of the greatest college coaches of all time. When USC teetered at
the brink of a scandal regarding rules violations, Carroll jumped ship and went
back to the pros, this time as the Seahawk’s coach.

We are
bussed to the aircraft, and standing opposite me on the bus is a dapper
European businessman--Italian perhaps--travelling to Guwahati with an
Indian associate. The man is smartly dressed in a grey suit, a navy
blue shirt, a deep blue tie with white dots, and a wristwatch with a
black leather strap with white stitching along its borders. His suit has
a check pattern and one of the interwoven threads defining the checks
is blue, stylishly picking up a color from his shirt. A blue and grey
folded silk kerchief projects from his coat pocket. His hair is gelled
and he has an old world mustache straight out a Cary Grant film. If a
man can be described as being “put together”, then here certainly was
the defining example. Seeing him and the other passengers I realize
there is a different kind of traveler to Guwahati today. Ten years ago
this same flight from Delhi to Guwahati to Imphal would have had people
carrying coconuts (or something similar) in industrial bags made of
thick inter-woven nylon strands. There was a hardy type of traveler to
the North-East who were the last bastions to the connection to the past
at urban airports and they too, were now changing.

On the flight
the Italian businessman is sitting in the seat behind me. As I return
from a trip to the washroom, I catch a glimpse of his laptop screen upon
which he is working at a powerpoint presentation, presumably
for potential clients in Guwahati. Against a blue background the chart
reads:
2 lipstick + 1 kajal + 1 eyeliner for you. 2 lipstick + 1 kajal + 1 eyeliner for customer 1 2 lipstick + 1 kajal + 1 eyeliner for customer 2 Savings Rs. 1.75
Such are the ways of European fashion in Guwahati.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

An elegant older gentleman
with thick white hair drove me from Northwestern to O’Hare the other day, our
limousine cruising by the drab suburban sprawl that surrounds midwestern
downtowns, years of harsh winter leaving its signature drabness long after the
snow is gone.

Limousine drivers
will never begin a conversation, but if initiated I have seldom met one who has
remained taciturn.When I tell him
I live forty miles North of New York City, the floodgates open.His grandmother died as a young woman
in Yonkers, of the killer flu that swept the nation in 1914.She was 21 and lies buried in a
graveyard in Yonkers.The
grandfather left for Chicago after that.He went to her graveyard in the 1950s when he had last visited New York
City.

He had the
Midwestern habit of using complete sentences in slow cadence, emphasizing the
occasional syllable when you least expect him to.He asked me whether I was a professor."An adjunct one at Columbia", I
said."Well", he responded, "my
father almost joined Columbia but then decided to accept an offer to be
Comptroller at the University of Chicago.Sometimes when he had to travel to Argonne, they would send the
helicopter out for him.There was
one piece of advise my father had given me", he continued, as young men and
women with knee high leather boots and floppy loosely knotted scarves headed
for lunch just weeks away from Fall. "Work hard but leave your work behind when you get home."Did he practice what he preached?"Oh, yeah.He would come home and that would be it. Often he would come
home and then my mother’n he would go out."

I wanted to know
how long the father had worked at the University."Well, my father--he loved his Budweiser and his
Chesterfields way too much and he was gone early. It was 1964 and it was the day that he bought my mother a
brand new car.Went down to the
Chevy dealership and bought her a Malibu convertible.That same day they drove out in the new car to her sister’s
place in Wheaton, Wisconsin.They returned
home and that same night he passed away in a massive heart attack.He was 52. I was then a student at SIU.An’ the call came in.They gave me the news.So
that night I ended up boarding a train.I was 21."

The conversation
moseyed its way, like they can do on such rides, to the music of this city and
how Chicago at one time was the music capital of the country.And not just because the city was
churning out pressings of Blues albums, as blacks migrated to the industrial
Midwest, but because Chicago’s radio stations, due to their central location in
the nation, were able to reach both coasts and therefore held an advantage.

The man was a
repository of the city’s history. Leaning back on his seat, his white hair in contrast to the
dark interior, he would flick a turn signal here, a tap of the brakes there,
and let loose, like a slow steam leak on a valve, a stream of words sculpted
with a story teller’s chisel. He rattled off the names of musicians who lived
in Chicago.About the Jazz club in
downtown that I had visited last year and which he thought had moved since then.
We passed by Oak Park. Ernest Hemingway was born there.Frank Lloyd Wright worked here.People still came from afar to look at
some of Wright’s buildings.At the
turn of the century folks would take the train on the weekend to Oak Park and
spend the day picknicking.Where,
I asked him. In the parks!.That’s
why the name.We pass
Arlington.He shows me the school
where Hillary Clinton went.

He was a
throwback.A seventy year old
driver in a big black American limo with a soft leather interior and a softer
suspension shushing its occupant in near mechanical silence through the outskirts
of Chicago. Imaginings of a past city and visions of a past world dominated by
Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Studebakers, and men in dark suits and hats that
suddenly felt so real in this massive vehicle with black leather and crimson
upholstery.

The Bangladeshi

The morning of our departure from a trip to Sydney we took a cab
to the airport. The driver was Bengali and had lived in Australia for over 20
years. I asked him how he liked it. It had been good for his family, he said,
not particularly so for himself. He had been a professor of textile engineering
in Bangladesh for 18 years and held a Masters degree from Leeds. After arriving
with his family in Australia as immigrants, he was unable to find work as a
professional and had remained unemployed for the first five years. They had
lived on dole and his wife’s income. This led him into his first job as a
cabbie on the late night shift. He painted for us a different picture of Sydney
than what we had seen—one of crime, gangs and drugs and the dangers faced by a
taxi driver on the night beat. He spoke of a Bangladeshi cab driver who was
thrown off a bridge late at night, his head bashed on a stone.

Our cabbie seemed happy to be speaking to us, and as a fellow
Bengali in a small town would do, gave us a full accounting of his and his
family’s situation. He spoke in almost a complete monologue throughout the 30
minute journey, except for my occasional questions seeking further detail or
clarification, intrusive by Western standards, but accepted and expected under
such circumstances. His family had done well and all four of his children had
completed college. The eldest, the son, was 36 and earned good money as an IT
professional and travelled the world. A son-in-law was working towards his
Ph.D. Two of the daughters worked, one was a housewife. Except for the older
daughter, the children's marriages had been arranged. He and his wife had made
the arrangements themselves within the Bangladeshi community. He was close to
retirement and looked forward to a time when he would start collecting his
pension. It was a success story for a man who arrived here in tenuous position
but now had 11 grand children in his adopted land. It had been at the personal
cost of his professional ambitions and except for a bittersweet acknowledgement
of this in his opening sentences, his accounting had remained mostly
matter-of-fact, and tinged with some pride as he spoke of his children’s jobs
and education.

I have seen the story of the educated cabbie in the
West over and over. I have met Pakistani professors of comparative literature,
Bangladeshi aeronautical engineers, and numerous Ethiopian engineering
graduates driving cabs in cities across America. I have had a Columbian cabbie
wave to me a dog-eared copy of a book by Borges that he would read while
waiting to pick up a passenger. They have talked to me about their lives, often
with a resigned sadness, and an acknowledgement of the counterweights that have
been part of the baggage of this balancing of their lives. They arrive in the
West and compress their stature, head bowed, crouching as a man has to when
entering a short tunnel, and in the end resign to live their lives in this
manner doing jobs that are incommensurate with their education, in the hope
that their children may stand upright, or that they may be able to send more
money back to their families, or that some day they will be able to build a
nice house back home and retire on their savings from the West.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Disembarking the aircraft and
entering an Indian airport, there is a unique smell, one that mixes the heat,
humidity, the counterbalance of airconditioning, and the whiff of
disinfectants. Today I sensed this smell much earlier, walking through the
passageway that led to the aircraft in Terminal 4 at JFK, New York. I thought
it was the mind playing games, for the weather was wholly difference: we had
driven in under an overcast sky and a temperature in the mid-thirties (F). But
I asked my sons and they sensed this too.

About eighteen years ago we had
travelled a similar route, that time my six month old son holding court sitting
in a bassinet in the aircraft cabin, flashing smiles at passengers. My older
son was then three and engrossed in his books. Today I am travelling with these
two young men, heading out to join M who is already in Kolkata. One is
eighteen, the other twenty-one, fast asleep either side of me, using my
shoulders as a pillow. I had picked them up last night when they returned from
college for their winter break. It is not often that the three of us travel
together anymore.

Why does a trip to India feel so
different and not as any other thirteen-hour flight to say, Sydney or Tokyo or
Seoul? Those trips just feel like an extrapolation of a visit to California.
India on the other hand, feels like a serious piece of travel. Twenty-five
years ago this would have made sense since it gave you the feeling of crossing
a certain border: Calcutta looked then like the photographs that you see of
Rangoon today, and the old colonial-mofussil style bureaucracy met you right at
the immigration when you stepped into the airport.

At luggage pickup at Kolkata
airport is a large sign: “Welcome to the City of Joy”. Throughout Kolkata one
sees references to this phrase, City of Joy, given originally by Dominique
Lapierre, author of the 1985 book by the same name, and adopted
enthusiastically by a Bengali audience at a time when India was starved of the
world’s attention so that, when a city like Kolkata was the centerpiece of a
major, though cliché filled book that was then made into a Hollywood movie, a
vestigial colonial mentality immediately picked up the phrase as a moniker for
the city. Today the pendulum has swung the other way, the country gets a lot of
attention and its proud elite appears overtly reactive, arrogant and even crass
in establishing both their Indianness and cosmopolitanism.

A realization strikes me in
Kolkata airport. A voice speaking Bengali in isolation sounds wonderful—there
is nothing sweeter than a few strains of Bengali heard over a vast sea of
people speaking in English in a foreign land: the words waft over as if on rose
petals. However, the effect is quite the reverse when there are many such
voices in the same crowd--yelling at their straying kids to stay close to the
fold, imperious men nodding commands to their drivers, flirtatious bands of
college going men and women--then these phrases abrade against the other and
the romance is fully wrung out of the language. You have not really appreciated
Bengali until you have heard that solo voice abroad in a place where you had
least expected it.

Part 2: Server Down Achey

India is one of the cheapest
places in the world for mobile voice and data and one of the offshoots of this
largesse of instant communication is that a new sentence has graced the Bengali
language:”server down achey”.

Over the past few years I have
gotten myself a 3G dongle and a SIM card for my phone every time that I have visited
India. Getting the authorization for these works in the end, but the path can
be a complex series of actions. Forms are filled up, a passport photo submitted,
and a young knowledgeable man at the mobile counter hands you the SIM card with
the indication that your card is all but ready to go, that it is just a matter
of minutes before you will be connected to the network. He is so assured, the
affirmative nod of his head so definite, that were he a General sending you to
war, you would have thundered into battle convinced that victory was your
birthright. You go home and nothing works. You call a help line
"executive", and they tell you “Server down achey. O hoye jaabey.
Apni chinta korben na.” You hear this a few times, and then some knowledgeable chap
somewhere finally fixes it so that it then works. I would just have hoped that
Kolkata, the literary capital of India, would come up with a few more creative
excuses. Such as, “Bit’er problem dada. Aajkeyto message gulo aschey thik'iy, kintu 1 aar 0 gulo bujhlen
to, ekdom ulto-palta hoye jacchey”

I spend the afternoon on the
sixth floor of a building in Ballygunge Circular Road looking down at an older
building about fifty meters away, a government flat complex, rich with memories
from three decades ago. We had gone for lunch to a cousin’s house, and she
pointed out to me the corner flat in this older building where they had lived
as children and where I would often visit as a teenager. A few days before I
left the country thirty years ago I had taken my cousins out for dinner to
Kwality’s at Ballygunge Phari and then at 10 pm walked down along Ballygunge
Circular Road with them to this flat. It is here that my aunt, to whom I was
very close, died. I spend some time looking at the flat quietly. It had’nt changed
much. There was a small park just outside its windows and there were children
who were playing in the park. The sounds--that of the crows and the
traffic--were I thought more or less the same as from that period. Neither the
occupants of that building, nor the people in the park would today remember the
family that used to live there, or the artistically inclined gentle lady who
passed away prematurely twenty four years ago. When a city sits on its haunches
upon your shoulders with its memories, it can lengthen a few moments of an
afternoon.

part III: Shantiniketan

Just outside of Kolkata there is
a complex of sweeping overpasses that one traverses to get to National Highway
2, enroute to Shantiniketan.We
had started at 7 am and within the first half hour I learned that the driver of
our rented car had grown up in the same street of Chetla where I had spent my
teenaged years.So while the car
sped along and crossed Nivedita Bridge, weaving in and out between trucks, he
filled me in on what had been going on in Chetla since.First off he told me that Bhola Goonda,
a notorious Chetla hoodlum from my childhood is now dead, sprayed with bullets
by gunmen as he had breakfast at Sannyasin’s Mishti shop about a dozen years
ago.I had seen Bhola when he was
a rising tough guy, a fearless bad apple, who would generally hang around the
teashops in the area.There was a
time when he became a source of neighborhood rumors for spending time chatting
with one of the young mothers of the locality: she would speak from behind the
window of her apartment and with him standing outside the property and just
beyond the porch.These exchanges
would take place openly in the afternoons for long periods of time when she was
alone at home. I had thought nothing of them, until I overheard the hushed
remarks in the conversation of grown-ups later.We had read the poem, The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes
sometime around then in school, and its subject matter--the fugitive Highwayman
who would arrive at his paramour’s house while she waited by the window--likely
affected my perception of the swashbuckling Bhola from then on.So that was how I remembered Bhola
Goonda from then on: rising hoodlum of Chetla and conversational companion to
housewives.

National Highway has a fast,
well-built blacktop and very soon we were out of the metropolis and heading
towards Bardhaman, passing dry farmland on either side with occasional small
towns and factories making industrial parts.At one point we passed the town of Singur, the would be
location for the Tata Nano factory in West Bengal.The cheapest car in the world would have been built there,
but an elaborate standoff between politicians, farmers and Tata led to the
plant’s abandonment and relocation. The tract of land that had been earmarked
for construction abuts the highway and we pass half -built boundary walls and
warehouses that, now abandoned, have already started succumbing to the
elements.A little beyond
Bardhaman we exit the National Highway and take a smaller road that headed
towards Gushkara.This would
eventually lead us to Shantiniketan.

NASA has available on the public
web, night-time high resolution satellite images of the earth for the past two
decades.Cities and townships show
up as patches and clusters lit up by electrical lighting.It is easy to see from these images
that habitation in India is heavily clustered around the roadways and grows out
from them.Driving along these
smaller roads, this fact becomes readily apparent.Life springs from the roadside. Business is conducted along
the shops that line it, and there is a continuous stream of local
traffic--pedestrians, two-wheelers and goods laden carts--along the edges of
the road, sharing it with the longer distance car and truck traffic. At times
the narrow road passes through small villages.Little seems to have changed and houses have walls built of
mud with small, forlorn square windows inscribed within them, and with droopy
thatch roofs like a ragamuffin’s head.Ponds dot the landscape, usually with a cluster of houses encircling
them.Farmland lines the stretch
of road between villages and there are little pump houses every few hundred
meters in the fields for handling the irrigation.Unlike many other jobs, farming seems to have a 50-50
distribution of men and women.

We drive into Shantiniketan, a
place with red earth, on the day of the annual Poush Mela (fair) and into a
major traffic jam that has clogged the entrance to the place.It is one of the major annual events of
the place.Parking our car at the
entrance to Shantiniketan and somewhere at the edges of the adjacent town of
Bolpur, we wait at a busy intersection for our hosts to come get us.As much as life has changed in the big
cities, particularly for the richer sections of the population, little seems to
have altered, to my eyes at least, in small town Bengal.The hodge-podge of storefronts, the
brightly colored synthetic fabrics, decaying, gravitas laden buildings from the
19th century--everything is diffuse, everything bleeds out a little
bit, every object moves into its adjacent space. People hop across the narrow
road blending in with cars; cars drift out to the walking areas by the road and
nudge pedestrians, private space often overlaps with public space. This is not
a place for someone who arrives from the land of straight lines.To the untrained eye, a busy
intersection in small town in India may seem to be at the precipice of a
calamity to the visitor, but in real life, it is usually far from it.

We stand in front of a street
side shack selling chickens and ducks, and, at the entrance to one of India’s
most artistic and elegant universities, Viswabharati in Shantiniketan, founded
by Tagore, one of our first experiences was to witness the execution of a duck
by a butcher, deftly done in the classic style of severing the neck against a
“bothi” or curved knife.

Enormous crowds throng at the
Poush Mela, which is laid out in a large field with folk singers, tribal
artisans selling their wares, foodstuff vendors, Ferris wheels, bookstores, and
agricultural and jute products shops. The afternoon that we drop in, a pair of
singers on the main stage improvises on current affairs. There is an entire of
row of stalls where tribal artisans sell Dhokra jewelry, made using a
traditional metalcasting process.The jewelers cast the metal in their small workshops using alloys
containing zinc or tin along with copper that enables them to melt the metals
at low temperatures. We don't have much time and by late afternoon exit the
Mela.

We have come to visit M’s eldest
aunt, a lady nearing ninety.She
has outlived her son and husband, who had been a professor of economics at
Viswabharati. In this laid back residential neighborhood called Purba-Palli,
Shantiniketan retains its sense of indescribable gentleness. Slightly run down
single storey houses with deep red floors and wide verandahs are centered in
properties with bouganvillea heavy gardens. Dogs and goats wander in and out of
the properties. A little girl plays with a goat tied to a leash on a
field.A few men split bamboo
stocks for constructional use. These are the traditional faculty housing,
though some of them seem to have been demolished and built up into large
vacation homes for the rich from the cities. Though they are more tasteful
versions of the US McMansions, they appear incongruous in this egilitarian
place. Confined to a wheelchair, the aunt lives alone, spending most of the day
in the sunlight verandah that overlooks the front garden and a large field
beyond.She is tended to by a
handful of women who all have lived there or nearabouts for years: one the
child of a past maidservant who now has a post-graduate degree and is looking
for a job and refuses to stay with her alcoholic father, one a superb cook who
set down a meal of posto, alu bhaja, daal and chicken for us that will remind
you of the sophistication of vegetarian Bengali dishes.The women take good care of her and are
fiercely protective—she is now almost childlike and requires constant
help.She in return, would not
stay with anyone else but them. When the aunt passes away, the house and
property will be sold back to the university. When this happens, the group of
women who have spent decades caring for the old lady and have lived their lives
here will be ejected from the property. It is clear that the aunt was
hauntingly beautiful at one time. He hair is straight and thick even today, and
in her younger days it ran down to her legs. When she smiles, you can see a
hint of humor in her steely gray eyes, in a face otherwise slowed down by
age.Combing her hair for her, one
of the ladies declared, “When she was young she was the prettiest one among all
of her sisters.”

part IV: few quick observations

ADIVASI MASSACRE:

A day before we were to leave for
Guwahati from Kolkata, around 80 adivasi (tribals) men, women and children were
brutally massacred by a separatist group in Assam. This was picked up in the
national news and there was indignation, but mostly in a matter-of-fact
manner.It would have been a
different story if this had happened to 80 Indians in Bangalore, or 8
international tourists in Delhi. A day after the massacre, that included
children being shot through their mouths, I saw a poignant photograph on the
web of a group of Adivasi men standing and ready to protect themselves and
their loved ones.They were armed
with bows and arrows for this is all that they had.

THE LAST MILE PROBLEM:

I am fascinated by the endgame of
getting a SIM card. In the final step to approval the internet, SMS and old
fashioned clerical paperwork have to climax in unison.The account is set on the internet,
then a SMS message sent to the user with a call back number. A man is
dispatched to the user’s house to verify the address. This is all very
spy-like.The wireless outlet
store in the mall is manned by a phalanx of customer support staff.Some of them are very, very good. Some
are terrible.All of them seem to
work extremely hard.The top 5%
are as competent as anyone I have seen anywhere—they can connect more dots than
what they are paid to.

3rd GENERATION
KOI-HAIs:

The behavior of a small percentage
of the Western tourists can be embarrassing—exhibiting a rudeness that they
would have dared not to in any developed nation and taking advantage of the
courtesy of the Indian wait-staff or airline staff. It is not a level playing
field for the staff who accept this treatment for fear of otherwise losing
their jobs. Mark Twain had written about such behavior in his 19th
century travelogue to India. Some traits remain. Perhaps the visitor feels
crowded by the pressures of a high population density. Perhaps it is because
very few of the staff in India like to respond with, “I don’t know” as an
answer and make up on the spot whatever suits their mind, frustrating the
visitor. Or perhaps the Indian attendants are just a bit too fawning. Whatever
it is, it looks ugly on the part of the visitors.

KOLKATA TRAFFIC HAS A PLAN

Thirty five years ago it was
believed that the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, CMDA-according
to my friend Shuvo--actually stood for “Kaatchi Maati Dekhbi Aay”, given the variety
of ongoing roadwork projects in the city at any time.Whether the CMDA still exists or not, I don’t know, but its
successors have continued that tradition, and the entire city is dug up with
the building of flyovers and new routes for the metro rail that links the city
all the way to the airport. Disruptive in the short term, there is a method to
this madness that can be best visualized by taking snapshot passages through
the city as I have done, roughly @ about once a year. If vehicular traffic increases
exponentially and the growth of roadways sub-exponentially, there is a
Malthusian-like crisis to be had in the future; which is where the growth of
the metro in Kolkata now seems such a clever idea.And so this city of poets and dreamers today have (I feel)
the most pragmatic plan for traffic management among the metros.

COROLLARY: THERE ARE HOLES IN
KOLKATA’S TRAFFIC PLAN

Driving to the airport, a little
beyond Ultadanga and where a giant flyover headed towards the airport was being
built, we saw an enormous construction pit ringed around which a large crowd
had gathered.There was a rickety
emergency vehicle parked and a few policemen who appeared as bewildered as the
crowd that they were supposed to control. It seems that a vehicle, or something,
had fallen into that hole from one on the roads that passed by it. This was not
the first time—our driver pointed out—a few weeks ago an entire bus had skidded
off the road and fallen into that same pit, killing several people.A couple of years ago part of a newly
built flyover had collapsed under the weight of a truck and that vehicle too,
had fallen a good vertical distance.

Part V: Guwahati

The Muezzin’s call at 4:30 am
over the loudspeakers splits the twilight chill of a Guwahati that is quiet after
the night’s revelries welcoming in the new year. The sounds of early morning
traffic have not yet begun, and the prayer comes across deep, pure, and
soulful.Guwahati is like a small
town that has suddenly discovered it is a city.Housing over a million people, it has no distributed sewage
system for human waste and residents are instead forced to install septic
systems in small properties with very little land. Today, the municipality has
vehicles that will pump out your septic tanks.But it can take several days to get an appointment. The
traditional style of cleaning out septic tanks had been a manual one using
labourers, called “sweepers”.I
saw an example of them in action.First a big hole is dug on the property nearabouts the septic tank.
After this the “sweepers” use their advance payment to go fortify themselves
with alcohol. This is apparently traditional practice as well. They arrive at
the job site drunk and carry out the dirty task of emptying the contents of the
septic tank into the pit that they had dug using buckets and without any
protective equipment, except that of alcohol that numbs their senses against
the stench and the filth.

“Hobo Diya” is a response that
one hears often in Assam, in response to a request for a certain action to be
undertaken. Its Bengali and Hindi equivalents are “hobey ekhon”, or “hoga
shayad”, but the Assamese version takes the phrase to new heights and imparts a
tone that is luminous with ambiguity. Its statement can have multiple
objectives.It can indicate the
deferment, indefinitely, of the request for a decision; it can be a gentler
metaphor for “no”, similar to the Japanese use of “very difficult”. Or it can
simply mean that the responder intends to continue the mindless exercise that
he is currently engaged in and does not wish to get into any complicated
thinking at this point as to its merits or demerits.

We return from Guwahati to Delhi
via the 3 pm flight on Indigo Air. Richard Gere had taken this same flight a
couple of weeks back and had kept the flight waiting since he had arrived
late.This time there is a large
group of religious pilgrims from North India on the aircraft. They appear to be
an extended family. The men are thick necked and beefy, and their sausage
fingers adorned with chunky rings cradle iphones.Most of them have fierce black mustaches, some have orange
colored strings attached to their wrists and some have necklaces.They speak to one another in a rough,
grating dialect.They have come
here to Kamakhya, one of India’s major Hindu temples for a pilgrimage.As the aircraft takes off, right at the
moment of wheels-up, one of them shouts “Kamakhya Maiya Ki” and the others
respond in resounding unison, “Jai”. Onwards to Delhi.

When the aircraft lands in Delhi
I have a text message awaiting me.It is the name and number of the driver of the car that we had rented. Thakur
was waiting for us outside with my name on a placard. And when you are hitting
the badlands of Delhi it is good idea to go with a man named Thakur.